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BIRDALONE SERIES 
OF ESSAYS 


FRIENDSHIP by 
Ralph Waldo Emerson 
























T AWOKE this 

1 Morning with 
devout Thanks' 
giving for my 

Friends, the Old 
and the New. 


















BY RALPH 
'WALDO - 
EMERSON 


1906 

MORGAN SHEPARD CO 

New York & San Francisco 












LIBRARY rtf CONGRESS ) 
i Wi.- uuomc received 
PtC J3 1903 

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ICLASS f\' yc. No, 

| /6 X^l3 

ConY A. ' 


PS 1616 

vAi 

1^66 


DECORATIONS COPYRIGHTED 

BY 

MORGAN SHEPARD CO. 
MCMVI 

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Reserve average 











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FRIENDSHIP 


E have a great deal 
more kindness than 
is ever spoken. 
Maugre all the sel¬ 
fishness that chills 
like east winds the 
world, the whole 
human family is 
bathed with an element of love like a 
fine ether. How many persons we 
meet in houses, whom we scarcely 
speak to, whom yet we honor and 
who honor us! How many we see in 
the street, or sit with in church, whom, 
though silently, we warmly rejoice to 
be with! Read the language of these 
wandering eye-beams. The heart 
knoweth. 

The effect of the indulgence of this 
human affection is a certain cordial 







Active 

Power* 


exhilaration. In poetry and in common 
speech, the emotions of benevolence 
and complacency which are felt to¬ 
wards others are likened to the material 
effects of fire; so swift, or much more 
swift, more active, more cheering, are 
these fine inward irradiations. From 
the highest degree of passionate love 
to the lowest degree of good-will, they 
make the sweetness of life. 

Our intellectual and active powers 
increase with our affection. The scholar 
sits down to write, and all his years of 
meditation do not furnish him with one 
good thought or happy expression; but 
it is necessary to write a letter to a 
friend,—and forthwith troops of gentle 
thoughts invest themselves, on every 
hand, with chosen words. See, in any 
house where virtue and self-respect 
abide, the palpitation which the ap¬ 
proach of a stranger causes. A 
commended stranger is expected and 
announced, and an uneasiness betwixt 


2 



pleasure and pain invades all the hearts The 
of a household. His arrival almost Stran 8 cr 
brings fear to the good hearts that 
would welcome him. The house is 
dusted, all things fly into their places, 
the old coat is exchanged for the new, 
and they must get up a dinner if they 
can. Of a commended stranger, only 
the good report is told by others, only 
the good and new is heard by us. He 
stands to us for humanity. He is what 
we wish. Having imagined and in¬ 
vested him, we ask how we should 
stand related in conversation and 
action with such a man, and are un¬ 
easy with fear. The same idea exalts 
conversation with him. We talk 
better than we are wont. We have the 
nimblest fancy, a richer memory, and 
our dumb devil has taken leave for the 
time. For long hours we can continue 
a series of sincere, graceful, rich com¬ 
munications, drawn from the oldest, 
secretest experience, so that they who 


3 


Affection sit by, of our own kinsfolk and acquaint¬ 
ance, shall feel a lively surprise at our 
unusual powers. But as soon as the 
stranger begins to intrude his partial¬ 
ities, his definitions, his defects, into 
the conversation, it is all over. He has 
heard the first, the last and best, he will 
ever hear from us. He is no stranger 
now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misappre¬ 
hension, are old acquaintances. Now, 
when he comes, he may get the order, 
the dress, and the dinner,—but the 
throbbing of the heart, and the com¬ 
munications of the soul, no more. 

Pleasant are these jets of affection, 
which relume a young world for me 
again. Delicious is a just and firm 
encounter of two in a thought, in a 
feeling. How beautiful, on their ap¬ 
proach to this beating heart, the steps 
and forms of the gifted and the true! 
The moment we indulge our affections, 
the earth is metamorphosed: there is 
no winter, and no night; all tragedies, 


4 



all ennuis vanish ; all duties even ; noth¬ 
ing fills the proceeding eternity but the 
forms all radiant of beloved persons. 
Let the soul be assured that somewhere 
in the universe it should rejoin its friend, 
and it would be content and cheerful 
alone for a thousand years. 

I awoke this morning with a de¬ 
vout thanksgiving for my friends, the 
old and the new. Shall I not call 
God the Beautiful, who daily showeth 
himself to me in his gifts? I chide 
society, I embrace solitude, and yet I 
am not so ungrateful as not to see the 
wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, 
as from time to time they pass my gate. 
Who hears me, who understands me, 
becomes mine,—a possession for all 
time. Nor is nature so poor but 
she gives me this joy several times, 
and thus we weave social threads of 
our own, a new web of relations; and, 
as many thoughts in succession sub¬ 
stantiate themselves, we shall by and 


My by stand in a new world of our own 
Friend* creation, and no longer strangers and 
pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My 

friends have come to me unsought. 
The great God gave them to me. By 
oldest right, by the divine affinity of 
virtue with itself, I find them, or rather, 
not I, but the Deity in me and in them ; 
both deride and cancel the thick walls 
of individual character, relation, age, 
sex, and circumstance, at which he 
usually connives, and now makes many 
one. High thanks I owe you, excel¬ 
lent lovers, who carry out the world 
for me to new and noble depths, and 
enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. 
These are not stark and stiffened 
persons, but the new-born poetry of 
God,—poetry without stop,—hymn, 
ode, and epic, poetry still flowing, and 
not yet caked in dead books with 
annotations and grammar, but Apollo 
and the Muses chanting still. Will 
these two separate themselves from me 


6 



again, or some of them? I know not, 
but I fear it not; for my relation to 
them is so pure, that we hold by simple 
affinity, and the Genius of my life 
being thus social, the same affinity will 
exert its energy on whomsoever is as 
noble as these men and women, where- 
ever I may be. 

I confess to an extreme tenderness 
of nature on this point. It is almost 
dangerous to me to “crush the sweet 
poison of misused wine” of the 
affections. A new person is to me 
always a great event, and hinders me 
from sleep. I have had such fine 
fancies lately about two or three 
persons as have given me delicious 
hours; but the joy ends in the day: it 
yields no fruit. Thought is not born of 
it; my action is very little modified. I 
must feel pride in my friend’s accom¬ 
plishments, as if they were mine,—wild, 
delicate, throbbing property in his 
virtues. I feel as warmly when he is 


A n 
Event 


7 



The praised as the lover when he hears 
Lover applause of his engaged maiden. We 
over-estimate the conscience of our 
friend. His goodness seems better 
than our goodness, his nature finer, 
his temptations less. Every thing that 
is his, his name, his form, his dress, 
books, and instruments, fancy enhances. 
Our own thought sounds new and 
larger from his mouth. 

Yet the systole and diastole of the 
heart are not without their analogy in 
the ebb and flow of love. Friendship, 
like the immortality of the soul, is too 
good to be believed. The lover, be¬ 

holding his maiden, half knows that 
she is not verily that which he worships; 
and in the golden hour of friendship 
we are surprised with shades of suspi¬ 
cion and unbelief. We doubt that we 
bestow on our hero the virtues in which 
he shines, and afterwards worship the 
form to which we have ascribed this 
divine inhabitation. In strictness, 


8 



the soul does not respect men as it re¬ 
spects itself. In strict science, all 
persons underlie the same condition of 
an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear 
to cool our love by facing the fact, by 
mining for the metaphysical foundation 
of this Elysian temple ? Shall I not be as 
real as the things I see ? If I am, I shall 
not fear to know them for what they 
are. Their essence is not less beau¬ 
tiful than their appearance, though it 
needs finer organs for its apprehension. 
The root of the plant is not unsightly 
to science, though for chaplets and fes¬ 
toons we cut the stem short. And I 
must hazard the production of the bald 
fact amidst these pleasing reveries, 
though it should prove an Egyptian 
skull at our banquet. A man who 
stands united with his thought con¬ 
ceives magnificently of himself. He 
is conscious of a universal success, even 
though bought by uniform particular 
failures. No advantages, no powers, 


Success 


9 



My no gold or force can be any match for 
Poverty him. I cannot choose but rely on my 
own poverty more than on your wealth. 
I cannot make your consciousness tanta¬ 
mount to mine. Only the star dazzles; 
the planet has a faint, moon-like ray. 
I hear what you say of the admirable 
parts and tried temper of the party you 
praise, but I see well that for all his 
purple cloaks I shall not like him, 
unless he is at last a poor Greek like 
me. I cannot deny it, O friend, that 
the vast shadow of the Phenomenal in¬ 
cludes thee also in its pied and painted 
immensity,—thee also, compared with 
whom all else is shadow. Thou art 
not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is,— 
thou art not my soul, but a picture 
and effigy of that. Thou hast come to 
me lately, and already thou art seizing 
thy hat and cloak. Is it not that the 
soul puts forth friends, as the tree puts 
forth leaves, and presently, by the 
germination of new buds, extrudes the 


10 



old leaf? The law of nature is alter¬ 
nation forevermore. Each electrical 
state superinduces the opposite. The 
soul environs itself with friends that it 
may enter into a grander self-acquaint¬ 
ance or solitude; and it goes alone for a 
season, that it may exalt its conversa¬ 
tion or society. This method betrays 
itself along the whole history of our 
personal relations. Ever the instinct of 
affection revives the hope of union with 
our mates, and ever the returning sense 
of insulation recalls us from the chase. 

Thus every man passes his life in 
the search after friendship; and if he 
should record his true sentiment, he 
might write a letter like this to each 
new candidate for his love: 

Dear Friend : 

If I was sure of thee, sure of thy 
capacity, sure to match my mood with 
thine, I should never think again of 
trifles, in relation to thy comings and 


11 


r > 


The goings. I am not very wise; my moods 
Laws are q U ft e attainable; and I respect thy 
genius; it is to me as yet unfathomed; 
yet dare I not presume in thee a per¬ 
fect intelligence of me, and so thou art 
to me a delicious torment. 

Thine ever, or never. 

Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine 
pains are for curiosity, and not for life. 
They are not to be indulged. This is 
to weave cobweb, and not cloth. Our 
friendships hurry to short and poor 
conclusions, because we have made 
them a texture of wine and dreams, 
instead of the tough fibre of the human 
heart. The laws of friendship are 
great, austere, and eternal, of one web 
with the laws of nature and of morals. 
But we have aimed at a swift and petty 
benefit, to suck a sudden sweetness. 
We snatch at the slowest fruit in the 
whole garden of God, which many 
summers and many winters must ripen. 


12 





We seek our friend not sacredly, a n t a g o - 
but with an adulterate passion, which nisms 
would appropriate him to ourselves. 

In vain. We are armed all over with 
subtle antagonisms, which, as soon 
as we meet, begin to play, and translate 
all poetry into stale prose. Almost all 
people descend to meet. All association 
must be a compromise, and, what is 
worst, the very flower and aroma of 
the flower of each of the beautiful na¬ 
tures disappear as they approach each 
other. What a perpetual disappoint¬ 
ment is actual society, even of the 
virtuous and gifted ! After interviews 
have been compassed with long fore¬ 
sight, we must be tormented presently 
by baffled blows, by sudden unseason¬ 
able apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of 
animal spirits, in the hey-day of friend¬ 
ship and thought. Our faculties do 
not play us true, and both parties are 
relieved by solitude. I ought to be 
equal to every relation. It makes no 

13 



Forgotten difference how many friends I have, 
and what content I can find in convers¬ 
ing with each, if there be one to whom 
I am not equal. If I have shrunk 
unequal from one contest, instantly the 
joy I find in all the rest becomes mean 
and cowardly. I should hate myself, 
if then I made my other friends my 
asylum. 

“ The valiant warrior famoused for fight, 
After a hundred victories, once foiled, 

Is from the book of honor razed quite, 

And all the rest forgot for which he toiled.” 

Our impatience is thus sharply re¬ 
buked. Bashfulness and apathy are a 
tough husk, in which a delicate organi¬ 
zation is protected from premature 
ripening. It would be lost if it knew 
itself before any of the best souls were 
yet ripe enough to know and own it. 
Respect the Naturlangsamkeit which 
hardens the ruby in a million years, 
and works in duration, in which, Alps 
and Andes come and go as rainbows. 


•> 


14 


The good spirit of our life has no Dainty 
heaven which is the price of rashness. riend * hl P 8 
Love, which is the essence of God, is 
not for levity, but for the total worth of 
man. Let us not have this childish 
luxury in our regards, but the austerest 
worth; let us approach our friend with 
an audacious trust in the truth of his 
heart, in the breadth, impossible to be 
overturned, of his foundations. 

The attractions of this subject are 
not to be resisted; and I leave, for the 
time, all account of subordinate social 
benefit, to speak of that select and 
sacred relation which is a kind of 
absolute, and which even leaves the 
language of love suspicious and 
common, so much is this purer, and 
nothing is so much divine. 

I do not wish to treat friendships 
daintily, but with roughest courage. 

When they are real, they are not glass 
threads or frost-work, but the solidest 
thing we know. For now, after so 

is 



An many ages of experience, what do we 
Alliance know of nature, or of ourselves? Not 
one step has man taken toward the 
solution of the problem of his destiny. 
In one condemnation of folly stands the 
whole universe of men. But the 
sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which I 
draw from this alliance with my broth¬ 
er’s soul, is the nut itself whereof all 
nature and all thought is but the husk 
and shell. Happy is the house that 
shelters a friend! It might well be 
built, like a festal bower or arch, to 
entertain him a single day. Happier, 
if he knows the solemnity of that re¬ 
lation, and honor its laws! It is no 
idle band, no holy day engagement. He 
who offers himself a candidate for that 
covenant comes up, like an Olympian, 
to the great games, where the first-born 
of the world are the competitors. He 
proposes himself for contests where 
Time, Want, Danger, are in the lists, 
and he alone is victor who has truth 


16 


enough in his constitution to preserve Truth 
the delicacy of his beauty from the 
wear and tear of all these. The 
gifts of fortune may be present or 
absent, but all the hap in that contest 
depends on intrinsic nobleness, and 
the contempt of trifles. There are 
two elements that go to the com¬ 
position of friendship, each so sovereign 
that I can detect no superiority in 
either, no reason why either should be 
first named. One is Truth. A friend 
is a person with whom I may be sin¬ 
cere. Before him I may think aloud. 

I am arrived at last in the presence of 
a man so real and equal, that I may 
drop even those undermost garments 
of dissimulation, courtesy, and second 
thought, which men never put off, and 
may deal with him with the simplicity 
and wholeness with which one chemi¬ 
cal atom meets another. Sincerity 
is the luxury allowed, like diadems 
and authority, only to the highest 

17 






f— c n 


rank, that being permitted to speak 
1 truth, as having none above it to court 
or conform unto. Every man alone is 
sincere. At the entrance of a second 
person hypocrisy begins. We parry 
and fend the approach of our fellow 
man by compliments, by gossip, by 
amusements, by affairs. We cover 
up our thought from him under a 
hundred folds. I knew a man who, 
under a certain religious frenzy, cast 
off this drapery, and, omitting all 
compliment and commonplace, spoke 
to the conscience of every person he 
encountered, and that with great insight 
and beauty. At first he was resisted, 
and all men agreed he was mad. But 
persisting, as indeed he could not help 
doing, for some time in this course, he 
attained to the advantage of bringing 
every man of his acquaintance into 
true relations with him. No man 
would think of speaking falsely with 
him, or of putting him off with any chat 


18 


of markets or reading-rooms. But 
every man was constrained by so much 
sincerity to face him, and what love of 
nature, what poetry, what symbol of 
truth he had, he did certainly show 
him. But to most of us society shows 
not its face and eye, but its side and its 
back. To stand in true relations 
with men in a false age is worth a fit 
of insanity, is it not? We can seldom 
go erect. Almost every man we meet 
requires some civility, requires to be 
humored;—he has some fame, some 
talent, some whim of religion or philan¬ 
thropy in his head that is not to be 
questioned, and so spoils all conversa¬ 
tion with him. But a friend is a sane 
man who exercises not my ingenuity, 
but me. My friend gives me enter¬ 
tainment without requiring me to 
stoop, or to lisp, or to mask myself. 
A friend, therefore, is a sort of para¬ 
dox in nature. I who alone am, I 
who see nothing in nature whose 


A Fa 
Age 


19 




Tenderness existence I can affirm with equal 
evidence to my own, behold now the 
semblance of my being in all its height, 
variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a 
foreign form; so that a friend may well 
be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. 

The other element of friendship is 
Tenderness. We are holden to men 
by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, 
by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by 
hate, by admiration, by every circum¬ 
stance and badge and trifle, but we can 
scarce believe that so much character 
can subsist in another as to draw us by 
love. Can another be so blessed, and 
- we so pure, that we can offer him 
tenderness? When a man becomes dear 
to me, I have touched the goal of 
fortune. I find very little written 
directly to the heart of this matter in 
books. And yet I have one text which 
I cannot choose but remember. My 
author says, “I offer myself faintly and 
bluntly to those whose I effectually am, 


20 


1 and tender myself least to him to whom 
^ I am the most devoted.” I wish that 
, friendship should have feet, as well as 
i eyes and eloquence. It must plant 
1 itself on the ground, before it walks 
over the moon. I wish it to be a little 
of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub. 
We chide the citizen because he makes 
love a commodity. It is an exchange 
of gifts, of useful loans; it is good 
neighborhood; it watches with the 
sick; it holds the pall at the funeral; 
and quite loses sight of the delicacies 
and nobility of the relation. But 

( though we cannot find the god under 
this disguise of a sutler, yet, on the 

( other hand, we cannot forgive the poet, 
if he spins his thread too fine, and does 
not substantiate his romance by the 
municipal virtues of justice, punctu¬ 
ality, fidelity, and pity. I hate the 
prostitution of the name of friendship 
to signify modish and wordly alliances. 
I much prefer the company of plough- 


A n 

Exchange 


21 






Life an 
Death 


boys and tin-pedlers to the silken and 
perfumed amity which only celebrates 
its days of encounter by a frivolous 
display, by rides in a curricle, and 
dinners at the best taverns. The end 
of friendship is a commerce the most 
strict and homely that can be joined; 
more strict than any of which we have 
experience. It is for aid and comfort 
through all the relations and passages 
of life and death. It is fit for serene 
days, and graceful gifts, and country 
rambles, but also for rough roads and 
hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and per¬ 
secution. It keeps company with the 
sallies of the wit and the trances of re¬ 
ligion. We are to dignify to each other 
the daily needs and offices of man’s life, 
and embellish it by courage, wisdom, 
and unity. It should never fall into 
something usual and settled, but should 
be alert and inventive, and add rhyme 
and reason to what was drudgery. 

For perfect friendship it may be said 


22 






to require natures so rare and costly, 
so well tempered each, and so happily 
adapted, and withal so circumstanced 
(for even in that particular, a poet says, 
| love demands that the parties be alto¬ 
gether paired), that very seldom can its 
satisfaction be realized. It cannot sub¬ 
sist in its perfection, say some of those 
who are learned in this warm lore of 
the heart, betwixt more than two. I 
am not quite so strict in my terms, 
perhaps because I have never known so 
high a fellowship as others. I please 
my imagination more with a circle of 
godlike men and women variously re¬ 
lated to each other, and between whom 
subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find 
this law of one to one peremptory for 
conversation, which is the practice and 
consummation of friendship. Do not 
mix waters too much. The best mix 
as ill as good and bad. You shall have 
very useful and cheering discourse at 
several times with two several men; 


Men and 
Wo men 


23 





G°° d but let all three of you come together, 

1 and you shall not have one new and 
hearty word. Two may talk and one 
may hear, but three cannot take part in 
a conversation of the most sincere and 
searching sort. In good company there 
is never such discourse between two, 
across the table, as takes place when 
you leave them alone. In good com¬ 
pany the individuals at once merge 
their egotism into a social soul exactly 
coextensive with the several conscious¬ 
nesses there present. No partialities of 
friend to friend, no fondnesses of 
brother to sister, of wife to husband, 
are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. 
Only he may then speak who can sail 
on the common thought of the party, 
and not poorly limited to his own. 

Now this convention, which good 
sense demands, destroys the high free¬ 
dom of great conversation, which re¬ 
quires an absolute running of two souls 
into one. 


24 




No two men but being left alone with 
each other enter into simpler relations. 
Yet it is affinity that determines which 
two shall converse. Unrelated men 
give little joy to each other ; will never 
suspect the latent powers of each. We 
talk sometimes of a great talent for 
conversation, as if it were a permanent 
property in some individuals. Conver¬ 
sation is an evanescent relation,— no 
more. A man is reputed to have 
thought and eloquence ; he cannot, for 
all that, say a word to his cousin or his 
uncle. They accuse his silence with as 
much reason as they would blame the 
insignificance of a dial in the shade. 
In the sun it will mark the hour. 
Among those who enjoy his thought, 
he will regain his tongue. 

Friendship requires that rare mean 
betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that 
piques each with the presence of power 
and of consent in the other party. Let 
me be alone to the end of the world, 


Con versa 
tion 


25 








rather than that my friend should over- 
3 step by a word or a look in his real 
sympathy. I am equally balked by 
antagonism and by compliance. Let 
him not cease an instant to be himself. 
The only joy I have in his being mine is 
that the not mine is mine. It turns the 
stomach, it blots the daylight, where I 
looked for a manly furtherance, or at 
least a manly resistance, to find a mush 
of concession. Better be a nettle in the 
side of your friend than his echo. The 
condition which high friendship de¬ 
mands is ability to do without it. To 
be capable of that high office requires 
great and sublime parts. There must 
be very two before they can be very 
one. Let it be an alliance of two large, 
formidable natures, mutually beheld, 
mutually feared, before yet they recog¬ 
nize the deep identity which beneath 
these disparities unites them. 

He only is fit for this society who is 
magnanimous. He must be so to know 

26 


its law. He must be one who is sure stand 
that greatness and goodness are always Aside 
economy. He must be one who is not 
swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. 

Let him not dare to intermeddle with 
this. Leave to the diamond its ages to 
grow, nor expect to accelerate the births 
of the eternal. Friendship demands a 
religious treatment. We must not be 
wilful, we must not provide. We talk 

( of choosing our friends, but friends are 
self-elected. Reverence is a great part 
of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. 

Of course, if he be a man, he has merits 
that are not yours, and that you cannot 
honor, if you must needs hold him close 
to your person. Stand aside. Give those 
merits room. Let them mount and ex¬ 
pand. Be not so much his friend 
that you can never know his peculiar 
energies ; like fond mammas who shut 
up their boy in the house until he is 
almost grown a girl. Are you the 
friend of your friend’s buttons, or of 


27 





Probation. 


his thought? To a great heart he will 
still be a stranger in a thousand partic¬ 
ulars, that he may come near in the 
holiest ground. Leave it to girls and 
boys to regard a friend as property, 
and to suck a short and all-confound¬ 
ing pleasure instead of the pure nectar 
of God. 

Let us buy our entrance to this guild 
by a long probation. Why should we 
desecrate noble and beautiful souls by 
intruding on them ? Why insist on rash 
personal relations with your friend? 
Why go to his house, or know his 
mother and brother and sisters ? Why 
be visited by him at your own ? Are 
these things material to our covenant ? 

Leave this touching and clawing. 
Let him be to me a spirit. A message, 
a thought, a sincerity, a glance from 
him I want, but not news, nor pottage. 
I can get politics, and chat, and neigh¬ 
borly conveniences from cheaper 
companions. Should not the society of 


28 



my friend be to me poetic, pure, uni- a Beautiful 
versal, and great as nature itself? E nemy 
Ought I to feel that our tie is profane 
in comparison with yonder bar of cloud 
that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump 
of waving grass that divides the brook? 

Let us not vilify, but raise it to that 
standard. That great defying eye, 
that scornful beauty of his mien and 
action, do not pique yourself on reduc¬ 
ing, but rather fortify and enhance. 

Worship his superiorities. Wish him 
not less by a thought, but hoard and 
tell them all. Guard him as thy great 
counterpart; have a princedom to thy 
friend. Let him be to thee forever a 
sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, 
devoutly revered; and not a trivial 
conveniency, to be soon outgrown and 
cast aside. The hues of the opal, the 
light of the diamond, are not to be seen 
if the eye is too near. To my friend 
I write a letter, and from him I receive 
a letter. That seems to you a little. 


29 


Fellowship 


Me it suffices. It is a spiritual gift 
worthy of him to give and of me to re¬ 
ceive. It profanes nobody. In these 
warm lines the heart will trust itself, 
as it will not to the tongue, and pour 
out the prophecy of a godlier existence 
than all the annals of heroism have yet 
made good. 

Respect so far the holy laws of this 
fellowship as not to prejudice its per¬ 
fect flower by your impatience for its 
opening. We must be our own before 
we can be another’s. There is at least 
this satisfaction in crime, according to 
the Latin proverb, you can speak to 
your accomplice on even terms. CW- 
men t quos inquinat, aequat. To those 
whom we admire and love, at first we 
cannot. Yet the least defect of self- 
possession vitiates, in my judgment, the 
entire relation. There can never be 
deep peace between two spirits, never 
mutual respect, until, in their dialogue, 
each stands for the whole world. 


30 


What is so great as friendship, let us 
carry with what grandeur of spirit we 
can. Let us be silent,— so we may 
hear the whisper of the gods. Let us 
not interfere. Who sent you to cast 
about what you should say to the select 
souls, or to say anything to such ? No 
matter how ingenious, no matter how 
graceful and bland. There are innumer¬ 
able degrees of folly and wisdom; and 
for you to say aught is to be frivolous. 
Wait, and thy soul shall speak. Wait 
until the necessary and everlasting 
overpowers you, until day and night 
avail themselves of your lips. The 
only money of God is God. He pays 
never with any thing less or any thing 
else. The only reward of virtue is 
virtue ; the only way to have a friend 
is to be one. Vain to hope to come 
nearer a man by getting into his house. 
If unlike, his soul only flees the faster 
from you, and you shall catch never a 
true glance of his eye. We see the 


Folly and 
Wisdom 


31 


Exchanged noble afar off, and they repel us; why 
Names should we intrude? Late—very late— 
we perceive that no arrangements, no 
introductions, no consuetudes, or habits 
of society, would be of any avail to 
establish us in such relations with them 
as we desire,— but solely the uprise of 
nature in us to the same degree it is in 
them; then shall we meet as water 
with water ; and if we should not meet 
them then we shall not want them, for 
we are already they. In the last an¬ 
alysis, love is only the reflection of a 
man’s own worthiness from other men. 
Men have sometimes exchanged names 
with their friends, as if they would 
signify that in their friend each loved 
his own soul. 

The higher the style we demand of 
friendship, of course the less easy to 
establish it with flesh and blood. We 
walk alone in the world. Friends such 
as we desire are dreams and fables. 
But a sublime hope cheers ever the 


32 


faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other Blunders 
regions of the universal power, souls Follies 
are now acting, enduring and daring, 
which can love us and which we can 
love. We may congratulate our¬ 
selves that the period of nonage, of 
follies, of blunders, and of shame is 
passed in solitude, and when we are 
finished men we shall grasp heroic 
hands in heroic hands. Only be ad¬ 
monished by what you already see, not 
to strike leagues of friendship with 
cheap persons, where no friendship can 
be. Our impatience betrays us into 
rash and foolish alliances, which no 
God attends. By persisting in your 
path, though you forfeit the little, you 
gain the great. You become pronounced. 

You demonstrate yourself, so as to put 
yourself out of the reach of false 
relations, and you draw to you the first¬ 
born of the world,—those rare pilgrims 
whereof only one or two wander in 
nature at once, and before whom the 


33 


Beggars 

All 


vulgar great show as specters and 
shadows merely. 

It is foolish to be afraid of making 
our ties too spiritual, as if so we could 
lose any genuine love. Whatever cor¬ 
rection of our popular views we make 
from insight, nature will be sure to bear 
us out in, and though it seem to rob us 
of some joy, will repay us with a greater. 
Let us feel, if we will, the absolute 
insulation of man. We are sure that 
we have all in us. We go to Europe, 
or we pursue persons, or we read books, 
in the instinctive faith that these will 
call it out and reveal us to ourselves. 
Beggars all. The persons are such as 
we ; the Europe, an old, faded garment 
of dead persons; the books, their 
ghosts. Let us drop this idolatry. Let 
us give over this mendicancy. Let us 
even bid our dearest friends farewell, 
and defy them, saying, “Who are you? 
Unhand me: I will be dependent no 
more.” Ah! seest thou not, O 

34 




brother, that thus we part only to meet A 
again on a higher platform, and only Harbinger 
be more each other’s, because we are 
more our own ? A friend is Janus¬ 
faced: he looks to the past and the 
future. He is the child of all my fore¬ 
going hours, the profit of those to come. 

He is the harbinger of a greater friend. 

It is the property of the divine to be 
reproductive. 

I do, then, with my friends as I do 
with my books. I would have them 
where I could find them, but I seldom 
use them. We must have society on 
our own terms, and admit or exclude it 
on the slightest cause. I cannot afford 
to speak much with my friend. If he 
is great, he makes me so great that I 
cannot descend to converse. In the 
great days, presentiments hover before 
me, far before me in the firmament. 

I ought then to dedicate myself to 
them. I go in that I may seize them, 

I go out that I may seize them. I fear 

3S 


Sympathies only that I may lose them receding 
into the sky in which now they are 
only a patch of brighter light. Then, 
though I prize my friends, I cannot 
afford to talk with them and study 
their visions, lest I lose my own. It 
would indeed give me a certain house¬ 
hold joy to quit this lofty seeking, this 
spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, 
and come down to warm sympathies 
with you; but then I know well I shall 
mourn always the vanishing of my 
mighty gods. It is true, next week 
I shall have languid times, when I can 
well afford to occupy myself with 
foreign objects; then I shall regret the 
lost literature of your mind, and wish 
you were by my side again. But if 
you come, perhaps you will fill my 
mind only with new visions, not with 
yourself, but with your lusters, and I 
shall not be able any more than now 
to converse with you. So I will owe 
to my friends this evanescent inter- 


36 


course. I will receive from them not Meeting 
what they have, but what they are. Parting 
They shall give me that which properly 
they cannot give me, but which radiates 
from them. But they shall not hold 
me by any relations less subtle and 
pure. We will meet as though we met 
not, and part as though we parted not. 

It has seemed to me lately more 
possible than I knew, to carry a friend¬ 
ship greatly, on one side, without due 
correspondence on the other. Why 
should I cumber myself with the poor 
fact that the receiver is not capacious ? 

It never troubles the sun that some of 
his rays fall wide and vain into ungrate¬ 
ful space, and only a small part on the 
reflecting planet. Let your greatness 
educate the crude and cold companion. 

If he is unequal, he will presently pass 
away; but thou art enlarged by thy 
own shining, and, no longer a mate for 
frogs and worms, dost soar and burn 
with the gods of the empyrean. It is 


37 


True 

Love 


thought a disgrace to love unrequited. 
But the great will see that true love 
cannot be unrequited. True love 
transcends instantly the unworthy 
object, and dwells and broods on the 
eternal; and when the poor, inter¬ 
posed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but 
feels rid of so much earth, and feels 
its independency the surer. Yet these 
things may hardly be said without a 
sort of treachery to the relation. The 
essence of friendship is entireness, a 
total magnanimity and trust. It must 
not surmise or provide for infirmity. 
It treats its objects as a god, that it 
may deify both. 















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